itsdelicious2

5 Perspectives on Indian Food

Part 4. The Curry Secret

Indian Restaurant Cookery at Home

Kris Dhillon

I came upon this book by accident, after being given a free gift voucher on Amazon. It was a cheap book and I thought it sounded interesting. Basically, the book describes itself as providing the authentic restaurant taste that eludes most home cooks when trying to reproduce curries from cook books at home. The problem, it states, is that most cookbooks will give you a very distinctive 'home-cooked' taste, which, although delicious, is not what you expect if you are used to eating Indian food only at restaurants.

For me, this seemed like an exciting challenge. I had eaten in many Indian restaurants, had an Indian friend at college, had been to India and loved to cook curries at home. Would the book live up to its premise?

I was surprised to find that it's all about the secret curry sauce that is prepared in every Indian restaurant and is the basis for all other curry dishes. I was very dubious that this same sauce would work as the foundation for 2 curries as different as say korma and madras. However, it really does. Adding a few elements such as chili powder, garam masala, salt, cashew nuts, yogurt etc. gives each curry a very distinctive flavour that tastes exactly like a restaurant meal. (A recipe is given for each curry telling you exactly what to add).

The sauce is quite time consuming to make and requires a lot of blending, boiling and skimming. But once you have a pot made it will keep in the fridge for a few days and serve 6 - 8 portions of any curry you fancy, such as Chicken Moghlai, chicken dhansak, chicken sagwala, bhuna ghost, lamb pasanda and keema peas, to name but a few.

There's also great chapters on breads, starters, balti dishes, fish curries, veg curries, rice and biryani, yogurt and drinks, sweets and snacks and nibbles containing a recipe for onion salad that immediately transformed me to a restaurant when I made it. The author also has some interesting stories about what it's like to work in an Indian restaurant, such as the head chef checking for the smoothness of the ground spices between his fingers demanding nothing less than absolute perfection and customers walking out of the restaurant in disgust at the lack of vividness to their red chicken tikka.

I have only made the sauce about 3 times, the first time transforming it into chicken tikka masala and rogan ghost. A curry loving friend came to dinner and assuming I had made the curries as I regularly did, began rhapsodising about how wonderful they were and how I should open a restaurant because they were as good as anything from any Indian restaurant he had been to! More praise for the book than myself I think, but the book certainly lives up to its promise.

Sometimes I feel like a home-cooked taste to my curries and will happily roast and grind spices, caramelise onions and brown meat patiently, enjoying the actual process as much as the end result. But if a particular restaurant dish is desired, this book is fantastic in that it offers you the opportunity to create this at home.